Archive | April, 2014

There has been increased focus on safety issues in the UK offshore sector over recent years. With that focus in mind we at Litre Meter want to make sure that our manufacturing focus is on safety in relation to both the environment and industry trends.

According to the most recent raw data available from the Health and Safety Executive in Q3 of 2013 there had been 27 offshore hyrdrocarbon releases in the UK. This represented a significant reduction in HCR releases in response to the HCR reduction plan initiated by Step Change in Safety (http://www.stepchangeinsafety.net/) in 2010.

The HSE has defined asset integrity as the ability of an asset to perform its required function effectively and efficiently while protecting health, safety and the environment. Asset integrity management was defined as the means for ensuring that the people, systems, processes and resources that deliver integrity are in place, in use and will perform on demand over the asset?s lifecycle.

Issues surrounding the environment and hydrocarbon releases, asset aging and life extension drive the focus on safety. We want to be able to help in the process of recognising hazards and reducing risk as well as help engineers take ownership of risk and asset integrity through proving assertions about the functionality and construction of instruments.

Litre Meter has therefore launched the first in a series of oil and gas industry safety surveys that will be introduced throughout 2014. The first survey concentrates on safety integrity levels (SIL) and one lucky respondent will win a Kindle for taking part.

SIL is the degree of likelihood that a safety instrumented function will operate effectively when it is required to. Four SILs are defined within the European Functional Safety standards based on the IEC 61508 standard, SIL 4 being the most dependable and SIL 1 being the least, taking into account such things as the development process and safety life cycle management.

The Litre Meter survey aims to find out to what extent engineers use SIL in specifying equipment and what reliance they place upon it.

To take the SIL survey visit http://tiny.cc/SILsurvey) and spend just a few minutes answering the questions.